Hey, it's Slowdown Producer Micah. What poems have helped you Slow Down, have made you stop and reflect.

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to find out more. I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

At parties, I jokingly discuss with friends about collectively purchasing property, maybe even a castle.

I want us to live out our days together to communally enact our shared values.

They are not convinced.

I romanticize social utopias, especially those that, guided by equity and love, espouse alternative ways of coexisting with each other and the land.

When I dream in this way, I let my inner socialists fly.

Honestly, though, I am thinking up ways to overcome a fixed income in retirement.

My older friend Rita called me out on my misguided idealism.

I told her I was born in a wrong decade that the radical values of yesterday, peace and love and freedom, should be renewed in our time.

She told me that I had watched too many movies about the 60s. In her

youth Rita joined an intentional community in Oregon. She corrected my

quaint notions by citing all the nights she went to bed

overworked. All the petty dramas by people who ultimately were fallible human beings.

Utopia is hard work.

Like the speaker in today's poem,

I am drawn to Utopia's as a response to life's complex problems, even if temporarily a convenient

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